Ep. 80 - Design Your Dream Life in Three Simple Steps

In Episode 80 of Your Words Unleashed, Leslie Wang walks you through one of her favorite tools for getting unstuck: a simple but powerful future self visualization. If you’ve been feeling overwhelmed or uncertain—about your career, your writing, or just life in general—this exercise can help you reconnect with what really matters.

Leslie shares how imagining a single day in her life 10 years into the future gave her clarity and even helped her make a long-held dream come true. 

You don’t need to have it all figured out—just a notebook, a little time, and a willingness to imagine something better.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why future self journaling is so effective (and fun!)
• A step-by-step guide to writing your vision
• How imagining your “worst case” can actually be calming
• Ways to use your vision to guide real-life choices
• Why this works even if it feels a little woo-woo

Grab your pen and get inspired. Full transcript and links at YourWordsUnleashed.com/80.

Check out Leslie's website at www.YourWordsUnleashed.com!

The three ways Leslie can help you in 2025:

#1: Six-month Your Words Unleashed signature book writing coaching program. Through 8 hour-long sessions tailored to your own needs and goals, we will pinpoint what’s keeping you stuck. We’ll figure out personalized solutions and strategies so you can create direction and lasting momentum with your book writing. I’ll also provide detailed feedback on your writing throughout

#2: Four-month Career Reset Program for Overwhelmed Academics who want to reconnect with purpose. Over the course of 6 hour-long sessions, we’ll clarify your personal career vision, create space for what matters, overcome internal obstacles to change, and define what success means on your own terms so you can work less and live more.

#3: Group Zoom Workshops that balance personal well-being with writing productivity. Topics include transforming your dissertation into a book; connecting to the deeper purpose of your work; as well as boundary setting.

Check everything out on my website and if you are interested in any of these, please shoot me an email at ...

Transcript

YWU Podcast Episode #80

Hi scholars. Welcome to the 80th episode of this podcast!

Thanks so much for being here and for sharing your precious time with me. I don’t take it for granted whatsoever.

Doing this type of public-facing work has been its own incredible journey where I continue to learn many lessons, and I’m excited about what’s to come.

So I know I said I was going to do an episode on how to self-promote without losing self-respect—and I will still do that soon, I promise.

But today I felt called to give you some coaching through an exercise that helps you visualize your life five or ten years from now. 

It’s a future self exercise, which is more concrete than the guided meditation I offered back on Episode 47: Unlock the Wisdom of Your Future Self.

The reason I wanted to offer this now is to give you a view of your life when, ideally, the political, economic, and social crises of the current moment are in the rear-view mirror. 

And ideally, it’s a time when the pendulum has swung back towards the values of humanity, justice, due process, free speech, education, and belief in progress through science and knowledge production.

I think that now is a very good time to do some real reflection on what YOU want out of your life and career.

We are finally past the first 100 horrible, chaotic days of Trump 2.0. I think most of us can honestly say that things have been far worse than we had predicted.

Yes, it was all spelled out in the Project 2025 manifesto. But, if you’re anything like me, you didn’t have time to read the entire 900-page-long document.

As a side note, if you are interested in knowing the details, the group Democracy Forward compiled a 48-page-long guide to Project 2025 that you can download for free from their website.

But I don’t want to belabor all of the terrible stuff that’s happened and continues to happen, as that dominates the news and social media. 

What I think is really important to address is the fact that many academic institutions and individual scholars are facing their own worst-case scenarios. 

Now this sounds like a bad thing, but it’s not. Let me tell you why.

When someone who is feeling a lot of fear and anxiety about something, one very powerful set of coaching questions is: “What is the worst that could happen? Then what would you do?” 

Now, the point of this is not to cause people to drop into negative or catastrophic thinking. 

It’s actually meant to help us face the worst-case scenario head on, and in doing so, deprive it of its power. 

Because a lot of what drains our energy is resisting the idea of the worst thing happening. 

But once we face this dreaded outcome and accept its possibility, there is space to recognize and consider a lot of other good options that fear can obscure. 

In short, truly imagining the worst can bring a lot of clarity. It allows us treat our own core values as the guide to move us in a new, and often better, direction.

So, with that, let’s figure out what you want that new direction to be.

You can find the full transcript of this episode at YourWordsUnleashed.com/80.

Envisioning Your Ideal Life in 5 or 10 Years 

Back in Episode 47, I talked about why it’s so important to connect with your future self.

By “future self” I mean not only an older, but also a wiser, more grounded and more centered version of yourself. This person’s calm and confidence comes from experience and knowing that everything will work out.

Future self visualizations are an important part of coaching. I’ve coached many clients to garner wisdom and support from their more evolved selves.

This is a particularly important exercise to do if you’re on the fence about staying in academia, which is the case for maybe half to three-quarters of the people I work with.

Through these visualizations, they are always able to tell whether or not they are still in the academy. And honestly, most of them still are but have found ways to make it sustainable and satisfying. 

As you can imagine, having this question resolved brings huge relief because there’s no need to put more energy and worry towards it.

But the exercise I’m going to give you is a bit less woo-woo, if you will.

It’s more about painting a detailed picture of what you really want your life to look like in the future. 

Writing it all down provides a sense of direction for your life by providing a destination to move towards.

Most of us can probably say what we want our lives to be like in very general terms. 

We want to be healthy and happy and perhaps living in a particular place or doing a certain kind of work.

But rarely do we picture our life in vivid, visceral and even mundane detail. The specificity of the details is what actually matters here.

Now, before I give you the instructions, I just wanted to share my experience of doing this type of exercise for the very first time.

Looking back, it was so accurate that it’s spooky.

I was 39 and deeply unhappy with my life. I was burnt out from my faculty position and felt like I had sacrificed the best years of my life to academia.

I had lived in the same old apartment in Cambridge for 5 years, hanging out with all the same people. Nothing seemed to be changing for me, at least not in a positive way.

What I wanted more than anything was a life partner and children, but I felt hopeless. At that time, I started reading books by Martha Beck. 

She’s actually a trained sociologist like me. But decades ago, she left academia to pursue her dreams to go down a wildly different, but ultimately very successful, path. She’s one of the very first well-known life coaches in the U.S. 

And if you’re interested, you may want to start with one of her early books called Finding Your Own North Star. I can also really recommend Finding Your Way in a Wild New World.

In one of these books—and I can’t even remember which one anymore—she included a short exercise about envisioning your life in 10 years. 

There were a number of detailed questions that revolved around a single day in your ideal future life.

I just remember that the first instruction was, “imagine your life exactly 10 years from today.”

Honestly, at first, I was a bit dubious about whether just closing my eyes and seeing what popped up would work. I didn’t know if I would I see anything at all.

But what I envisioned in that one exercise totally changed the direction of my entire life.

I closed my eyes, put myself 10 years forward. I saw myself standing in a kitchen of a nice house where I knew I lived, making myself a cup of tea. 

The thought running through my 49-year-old mind was, “I’m so glad that everything worked out!”

The other really notable thing was that there was a small boy playing on the floor next to me. I just knew that he was my son.

I couldn’t see his face, but incredibly, I somehow also knew that he was 7 years old. So doing the math, that meant that I had him at the age of 42.

Recall that I was 39 at the time. I was SO skeptical that in about two-and-a-half short years, I would somehow meet my partner and we would have a child together.

I didn’t believe it at first. I mean, I had been single for most of my 30s so I couldn’t see how things could unfold that quickly for me.

But the vision was very strong. I somehow knew internally that it wasn’t just something my mind was creating to make me feel better. 

In fact, it was a much bigger dream than I would have consciously allowed myself to have because I was very pessimistic at the time.

Long story short, much more went into making this vision a reality. This included getting a lot of coaching and learning how to reframe my own limiting beliefs about what was possible. 

It also required to go out of my comfort zone and meet many different kinds of people while maintaining an open mindset.

But, it also all came true in exactly that way. I met my now-husband when I had just turned 40, I got pregnant at 41, and I had a healthy son at 42.

And we do live in a nice house and, at 47, I am already so glad that everything worked out.

This is why, when doing the exercise I’m about to give you, it’s integral to dream big and envision a life where everything has gone as well as you had hoped. 

Try to set aside any doubts. 

Although as I learned through my own experience, those doubts can be overridden by a deeper part of you that already believes everything you desire is indeed possible.

Exercise to Imagine Your Ideal Future 

So now, let’s get onto the exercise! 

Like I said, there are many versions of this out there, but the one I’m going to give is inspired by designer and educator Debbie Millman (who herself got this from her own teacher). 

She talked about it on an episode of Tim Ferris’ popular podcast, which I’ll link to on this episode’s page on my website.

I’m going to give you three separate steps, with the second one being the longest.

Make sure you do this when you are in a relatively good mental state. 

So not when you’re in the midst of grading finals and commencement activities. Or dealing with students who used AI to write their papers or recently reappeared after not attending all semester. You get the point!

Wait until you’re in a place to really reflect and dream big.

Here we go:

Step 1. 

Grab a pen and a piece of paper OR you can type this into a document. Give yourself at least 30 min. 

Step 2. 

Imagine that it is either exactly 5 years from today or exactly 10 years from today. Choose the one that feels better to you in this moment. 

Now you are going to write down what you're doing that day from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep.

You are going to write this in full sentences and full paragraphs. No bullet-points please!

Dream boldly and in vivid detail. What if you got everything you ever wanted with no fear of failure?

Now get specific:

-Where exactly are you living? What country, state, city, and neighborhood?

-Describe your bedroom. Describe your house. Describe your furniture. 

-Describe who lives in your house. Do you have a significant other? Do you have children? Do you have pets? 

-Describe your neighborhood. 

-Now let’s move onto your morning. What is your morning like? Where do you work? What time do you start work?

-What's on your calendar that day?

-If you still have a job, what specific kind of work do you do? What role do you play? Who are you working with? How do you feel about your job? What excites you about your work?

-What is your salary?

-What is your health like?

-What about your relationships with partners, children, parents, siblings, friends, etc.?

-What are your hobbies? How often do you travel?

-Write down what you’re doing that afternoon and in the evening all the way up until you go to sleep that night.

Put your whole heart into it. Keep writing until you have no other desires left.

Now, Step 3 is simple but very important.

Reread what you wrote every 6 months, or at least once per year. Put a reminder in your calendar now.

Each time you read it, imagine that day in more detail. You'll actually start making micro-decisions that guide you there.

Summing It All Up

So let’s sum it all up.

I have given you an exercise to design your own ideal future life. 

Of course, things may not work out 100% in the ways you’ve written about, but the essence of these things likely will.

This exercise allows you to envision one day through the lens of all the things that matter most to you, which represent your core values.

Having this holistic future life vision effectively propels you in a particular direction.

Now, bear in mind that writing this all down is enough for now. 

A lot of times, our minds spin into problem-solving mode where we worry about HOW to make specific things happen. 

We try to force things, and that often does not work out well.

That’s not the point here. 

Really, you’ve done this exercise to plant a powerful seed in your mind and spirit that will help you recognize opportunities that move you closer to this vision.

In five or ten years, the world will be much different than it is today. At least for me, and I hope for you as well, that provides a deep sense of relief.

I definitely need to do this exercise again soon, as nearly everything from the last time has come true!

If you do this, please consider sharing it with me! I’d love to hear what you come up with.

You can email me at Leslie@YourWordsUnleashed.com. 

Sending you all good energy to get through this crazy time in one piece. I’ll talk to you again soon!